After his visit to Cannes to present Killers of the Flower Moon, his latest film, Martin Scorsese went to Italy where he met Pope Francis, reports Variety. Thirty-five years after The Last Temptation of Christ, the director took this opportunity to testify to his attachment to the Catholic faith and his intentions to produce a new film about Jesus.
"I responded to the pope's call to artists in the only way I know: by imagining and writing a script for a film about Jesus," Martin Scorsese announced Saturday at a conference in Rome at the Vatican. And I'm about to start doing that."
Martin Scorsese and his wife Helen Morris met Pope Francis in a brief private audience at the Vatican before heading to a conference titled "The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination," organized by the Jesuit newspaper La Civiltà Cattolica and Georgetown University.
Antonio Spadaro, editor-in-chief of the newspaper, recounted how, in their discussion at the conference, Martin Scorsese multiplied anecdotes about his faith and how the director also expressed his admiration for Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew.